


Ignite

by dreamoverdrive



Series: Royai Week 2016 [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Romance, Royai Week 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 12:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7171424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamoverdrive/pseuds/dreamoverdrive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A piece exploring Roy and Riza’s capacity to hurt and protect each other. </p>
<p>"She remembered there were far better reasons to burn and be burned than selfishness."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignite

She had gotten into the habit of letting her fingers drift to the crook of her neck. It was like a compulsion to feel the hard webs of distorted skin that had bubbled and crusted and dried into something malformed and different. She didn’t feel as though the new shape of her skin was any less valid than the soft plane of the old one, but she still liked to explore familiar rises and falls and hollows and protrusions that were _unnatural_ and wrought upon her.

She liked them.

She supposed that was insane in itself. Why should someone like their scars, especially scars that hid something terrible under rerouted capillaries? After some serious thought, she decided it was because she had spent her life always on the precipice of before.

Before meant waiting and stagnation. It meant empty hallways and closed doors with muted voices discussing secrets that she couldn’t be privy to, but that she would have to bear on her back like she was the sinful aftermath of a crucifixion. She was the void meant to consume everything that they could not stomach.

What her father had discovered was evil. Brilliant, powerful, and all-consuming evil. And it shouldn’t exist, but it deserved to exist by the sheer _brilliance_ of its evil. Who knew that someone could stand feet away from another human being, grind fingers against palm, and watch the insides of someone’s eyes boil?

Who knew.

She needed to feel it for herself, feel the power that she had been made vessel of. She wanted to feel the same brand eating away at her flesh, because it was part of her. She wanted to feel what she had unleashed, what she had released into the world when she opened Pandora’s box by merely unbuttoning her blouse and baring her back.

She had felt this desire out of masochism. She wanted to burn in the hell she was the gateway to out of self-loathing, but when she turned and saw the soft sadness and blamelessness of his face in the bloody afternoon light filtering through the shrouded window, she had to remember that after all the demons had flown away to wreak their damage, hope had stayed.

She remembered there were far better reasons to burn and be burned than selfishness.

And the hesitance and shame in his face as he memorized the secrets of her skin were enough to give her hope. He gave her hope, because anyone this somber yet willing to sin would be capable of doing what she needed the most.

He could set her free.

When she asked him for this release on her knees with the painful heat of the boiling sand biting into her palms, she closed her eyes and felt cold sweat ripple down the ridges of her spine. If he said yes, she thought, then he loved her. If he said no, she thought, he had a different core than she did, one that was moral, and pure, and unstainable.

When he told her that he would do it, she felt a stinging wave of bittersweet relief. They were complicit in their sins, capable of the same feats of bloodshed and destruction.

Even upon each other.

So when she stood staring into his innocent face in the tunnel, knowing that it was guise and a flesh representation meant to trick her, she still felt herself pause for a moment. Her finger jerked away from the hot metal of the trigger in hesitation that would have been imperceptible to anyone else.

Her smile of triumph was taut, strained with hidden panic at the impulses and fibers of her being that screamed their protest.

_God, she couldn’t shoot him. Even if it wasn’t him, she couldn’t shoot him._

But a split second later, grin still in place, she felt the trigger sink away from the pressure of her finger. The spark rippled through the gun, vibrating against the palm of her hand, and then kicking back slightly as the gunpowder ignited and propelled a bullet toward the man she would have clawed through heaven and hell for.

Equivalent exchange, she thought as she uttered hollow words of triumph and watched his familiar face warp into an expression that was unrecognizable. If he could burn her, she could burn him.

Then moments later, when she finally hauled her battered body off the wet floor of the tunnel where Envy had left her, and staggered out to see the pure _hatred_ and _violence_ and _murder_ etched in the lines of his face, she raised her gun again, thinking that if she had to turn her form of fire on him, it would only end with her burying a bullet in her own brain.

But that would only be fitting. The fire had been lit long ago, and she intended to see it out to its dying embers.


End file.
